“Boxes”

5mx7m, Paper boxes

Sculpture

Steve’s fourth installation of boxes shows significant progress in the arrangement, scale, and imaginative space compared to his previous works. The large installation made of boxes and cardboard fills half the room and can be imagined as a giant womb producing small boxes or a fish belly being dissected with its innards spilling out.

Steve’s work inevitably reminds us of Rachel Whiteread’s series of box works, which both provides a path for reference and a stumbling block that limits the development direction. Based on my perception of the two artists’ works, I believe that the visual impact of Steve’s work is limited by the size of the studio. The element of boxes is naturally characterized by three features: a large quantity, storage implications, and an industrial nature (replicability). If box works are designed and placed in outdoor or large spaces by the artist, it is easy to create a sense of strangeness and become a landscape sculpture, but if placed in a confined indoor space, they may revert to their everyday storage context, making it difficult to create an impact and imagination.

The quantity of boxes can also be increased, as seen in Rachel Whiteread’s series of large projects, where the addition of quantity and scale can not only create difficulties for the artist in terms of funding and work, but also bring non-daily absurdity and associations to the audience.

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